Having small quantities of gas or other volatile compounds can be a critical requirement in several industrial sectors. However, having small quantities of gas or volatile compounds in an easy-to-use format, or one that allows their controlled release can be a much more critical factor in industries such as agribusiness or pharmaceuticals.
Ripening and senescence and disease control in fruits is an economically relevant problem and has been faced with conventional techniques, mainly with low temperature storage to lower fruit metabolism, and with accessory technologies such as atmosphere modification (controlled, AC, or modified, AM), along with fungicide application, principally ones synthetized according to usage and maximal waste regulations. However, conventional handling is not exempt of difficulties such as quality and opportunity problems and rot losses, meaning an import resource loss.
Currently, solutions based on new fruit varieties having enhanced fungus resistance and improved post-harvest properties for greater storage capacity are being sought. However, those solutions are long-term processes, and a fruit variety that is fully resistant to pathogens will hardly be found because adaptive microorganism capacity against extreme environment conditions, represented by several resistant strains, surpasses fruit genome versatility.
On the other hand, the fruit export industry is based on a product that is essentially alive, and because of this, in most cases (climacteric and non-climacteric fruits), it is required to have an evolution in the ripening process, to obtain the product properties expected by consumers, which will unswervingly lead to senescence and death. This is why many of the current efforts approached are conventional ones with a certain refinement degree, depending on the concerned fruit prices. In other words, if the product is a more valuable one, investments in time shortening between product harvest and consumer can be achieved by air transportation, but due to the great cost that this represents, only a small product niche can profit from the initial investment from this shipping option. On the other hand, if a fruit has low-temperature difficulties such as mealiness in peaches/nectarines, it can be subjected to conditioning treatments, and that will mean tree-ripe fruit export, but with a very limited post-harvest life, making this business logistics a complex job, which leads to them being used only in a very small percentage of the total production volume.